Ambulances turn yellow for Europe

March 6th, 2002

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Euro yellow, the new colour for our ambulances – White paint becomes a casualty of conformity (Daily Mail, 6 March 2002, page 30)Traditional white British ambulances are to be repainted yellow to bring them into line with Europe. The new colour will be adopted across the continent to make the emergency vehicles uniformly recognisable in every country. … The ambulance repainting is the latest European attempt to change elements of the traditional British way of life to fall in line with the rest of Europe. In the past, European Commissioners famously infuriated fruiterers and grocers when they deemed that our cucumbers were to (sic) curvy and our bananas too bend.

There is no EU legislation that advocates the use of particular colours on emergency vehicles. The independent European Committee for Standardisation, which promotes voluntary technical harmonisation in Europe, issued the report referred to in these articles.
European standards are developed on the basis of voluntary agreement between individual countries and other interested parties. The committee is made up of national standards bodies, not countries. The representative from the UK is the British Standards Institution.

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